Perceptual learning is considered a manifestation of neural plasticity in the human brain. We investigated brain plasticity mechanisms in a learning task using noninvasive transcranial electrical stimulation (tES). We hypothesized that different types of tES would have varying actions on the nervous system, which would result in different efficacies of neural plasticity modulation. Thus, the pr...

Neural plasticity has, despite a growing interest in neuroscience over the last decades, received little interest in consciousness research. This might be because neural plasticity has no clear and strict definition; it is used to describe the ability of neuronal tissue to adjust activities and physical characteristics in order to adapt to changes in the environment or changes in their use – in...

Neuroscience research in slice preparations and animal models within the last decade has shown that neural plasticity is a ubiquitous mechanism by which the brain represents and encodes its dynamic sensory world. This workshop considered how dynamic sensory representations are modified by experience, new methods for imaging those representations in human subjects, and applications of human neur...

In fact, these questions indicate that there are three different types of explanatory gap for consciousness. There’s the absolute gap: Why should neural processes be ‘accompanied’ by any conscious experience at all? And there are two comparative gaps. First, there’s the intermodal comparative gap: Why does certain neural activity give rise to visual rather than auditory experience, say? Second,...

Neural plasticity refers to the ability of one’s brain to change its structure and/or function in response to changes in behavior, environment, and neural processes. When a person suffers an ischemic brain injury, it often leads to hemisyndrome with motor and sensory deficits in the arm, leg, and face of one side. This article discusses the various ways that the existing network can be restruct...

Introduction: C. elegans neural network is a good sample for neural networks studies, because its structural details are completely determined. In this study, the virtual neural network of this worm that was proposed by Suzuki et al. for control of movement was reconstructed by adding newly discovered synapses for each of these network neurons. These synapses are newly discovered in the actu...

For more than two decades, there have been extensive studies of experience-based neural plasticity exploring effective applications of brain plasticity for cognitive and motor development. Research suggests that human brains continuously undergo structural reorganization and functional changes in response to stimulations or training. From a developmental point of view, the assumption of lifespa...

Self-organization in biological nervous systems during the lifetime is known to largely occur through a process of plasticity that is dependent upon the spike-timing activity in connected neurons. In the field of computational neuroscience, much effort has been dedicated to building up computational models of neural plasticity to replicate experimental data. Most recently, increasing attention ...

The adult brain continues to learn and can recover from injury, but the elements and operation of the neural circuits responsible for this plasticity are not known. In previous work, we have shown that locomotion dramatically enhances neural activity in the visual cortex (V1) of the mouse (Niell and Stryker, 2010), identified the cortical circuit responsible for this enhancement (Fu et al., 201...

The brain is constantly adapting to environmental and endogenous changes (including injury) that occur at every stage of life. The mechanisms that regulate neural plasticity have been refined over millions of years. Motivation and sensory experience directly shape the rewiring that makes learning and neurological recovery possible. Guiding neural reorganization in a manner that facilitates reco...